Representation and contribution-integration challenges in collaborative situation assessment

Blackboard systems are an ideal architecture for situation assessment involving large data volumes and heterogeneous data and knowledge sources. However, the ad hoc confidence and belief values used in traditional blackboard applications has led to criticism of the blackboard approach and spawned efforts to combine collaborative blackboard-system techniques with more "principled" graphical-network representations. We discuss two important collaborative-assessment challenge areas: 1) principled blackboard representations and 2) principled integration of contributions made by independent knowledge-source entities. The complexity of these challenges is highlighted using a very simple assessment scenario.